Sunday Dalí: The Persistence of Memory. 1931. Oil on canvas. 9.5” x 13”. Museum of Modern Art, New York City.

One of Dalí’s most famous paintings, it was first shown at the Pierre Colle Gallery in Paris in June 1931, and caused a sensation when it was included in a group show of Surrealist work at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York in January 1932. The enduring fascination generated by this enigmatic image is due to the way it fuses the banal and the fantastic, the symbolic and th irrational, inviting yet resisting interpretation. Dalí’s observation that “the soft watches are nothing else than the tender, extravagant, and solitary paranoic-critical camembert of time and space” is similarly ambivalent, referring to the painting’s genisis and also to its tantalizing significance.

Essentially the soft watches demonstrate that one aspect of the paranoiac-critical method is its capacity to link objects to qualities normally associated with other, completely different, elements.  Dalí painted the setting first, a deserted landscape at Port Lligat where he and Gala had bought a fisherman’s hut the previous summer. Initially he had no idea who to develop the picture. Inspiration came unexpectedly. About to retire to bed, he glanced at the painting; suddenly the memory of the softness of the camembert he had been eating earlier projected itself into his imagination, attaching itself to and transforming the idea of watches in his mind. He instantly and faithfully transcribed the resulting image, draping a watch over the branch of an olive tree. The other elements in the painting show how this irrational idea was then developed and invested with significance. In the foreground the self-portrait motif reappears in the form of a fetus abandoned on a beach. This refers to Dalí’s professed memories of intrauterine life and suggests the trauma of birth. A watch sagging across the fetus and another hanging from a plinth evoke the feelings of timelessness associated with the experience of pre-birth. The title of the painting thus refers to prenatal memories and its subject is “the horrible traumatism of birth by which we are expunged from paradise.” The title also relates to Gala’s response when Dalí asked her whether in three years time she would have forgotten this painting. She replied, “No one can forget it once he has seen it.”

Moorhouse, Paul. Dali. London: PRC Publishing Ltd, 2001.